The newly built studio is quite small and not much to look at: enough room for a bed, a small table, a bathroom, fridge, stove and microwave, a small rectangular window that looks out to a light-industrial area of St. Paul’s University Avenue.

But this is finally home, a palace even, for Trish Miller, a 17-year-old who has been homeless for the past two years.

“It’s going good right now,” she told me as we sat this week in a conference room at Prior Crossing, a 44-unit studio apartment complex built for young folks just like her. “I have a place where, well, it’s mine, it’s safe and where I can put my things.”

I know what it’s like to live with other people for a spell. My mother and I moved in with an uncle after she left my father. We later lived with an aunt, her husband, three kids and the relatives who showed up unannounced for extended visits.

But I’ve never known what it is like to be truly homeless. No couch-hopping. No emergency stays at a shelter with sometimes daily deadlines to leave and return, if there’s room. No angst or desperation from not knowing where I would sleep or if I would eat a meal on any given day.

But Miller knows. Problems at home caused her to be kicked out or leave voluntarily several times. She has bounced around, spending time with a parent in Alabama, a grandmother in California, a friend’s home in Minneapolis. Two months ago, she became one of the first young residents to move into the $10.7 million project.

The largest homeless youth residence of its kind in the east metro, it was built by the Beacon Interfaith Collaborative to provide indefinite shelter and help alleviate in a small but not insignificant way the problem of homeless youth in the Twin Cities area. Five years ago, the coalition of congregations also spearheaded a similar complex, Nicollet Square In Minneapolis, and is building another one in Edina.

Roughly 16 percent of the state’s estimated 9,312 homeless population on any given night are youths living on their own without parents, according to Michelle Gerrard, senior research manager at Wilder Research. According to both federal and state standards, the definition of a homeless youth has been expanded to age 24.

“The (age) expansion has a lot to do with brain development research,” Gerrard explained, adding that the human brain is not fully developed until age 26. Another consideration concerns the long-term effects of trauma and abuse among a segment of the homeless youth population.

Finding rental housing in the current market is an extremely tough endeavor, Gerrard noted. “The vacancy rate is low and it is difficult for people most at risk to find rental housing because they are competing with everyone else out there and the rents are much more than what they can afford. That’s why it is important to have special housing for them.”

Miller is a senior at Paladin Career and Technical High School, an alternative charter school inside Northtown Mall in Blaine. It takes her 90 minutes one way by light rail and bus to get there.

“The people there are very supportive,” she said. She is juggling classes while working full time as a telemarketer for a firm a few doors down from her “place.”

As the rule, she pays 30 percent of the rent. The House of Hope Church in St. Paul contributed $500,000 to the building effort. Beacon was awarded $8 million of the $100 million the Minnesota Legislature earmarked in 2014 for affordable-housing bonds. The Saintly City kicked in $1.1-million: the Metropolitan Council added $927,000.

Tenant supportive services, which include case managers, education and employment services provided by Wilder, costs $500,000 annually, or about $1,000 monthly per tenant.

Is the public-private money worth investing in such a transient, at-risk group?

Lee Blons believes so.

“When we talk about the achievement gap in the schools, these are the kids, these are the kids that the schools have failed,” said Blons, Beacon’s executive director. “But what we find is that if they have a stable home, it’s amazing what they can do and that they can finish high school or get their GED or get that job.”

She added that it cost more than $1,000 monthly just to place a youth in emergency homeless shelter alone.

“What is the cost to society if we don’t hook such young people?” she said. “These are young people that ended up homeless because they ended up feeling like the streets were safer than their own homes. Imagine how that feels like, and also to know that they have trauma from their families and they have trauma from the streets.”

Miller plans to graduate at the end of the academic year. She has a general idea of perhaps one day not only working with battered women, but running a shelter for them.

Among the few possessions she has kept with her during her homeless ordeal is a jewelry box given to her by her late paternal grandmother.

“When you are homeless, you expect that things will be stolen, taken from you,” she said. “But the box, it’s in a safe place.“ Perhaps, finally, like her.

From smoking crack in a Harlem drug den for a front-page exposé to covering the deaths of 86 people in a Bronx social club fire, Rubén Rosario spent 11 years as a writer for the New York Daily News before joining the Pioneer Press in 1991 as special correspondent and city editor. He launched his award-winning column in 1997. He is by far the loudest writer in the newsroom over the phone.

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